Alex Fialho is a curator and writer originally from California. He studied modern and contemporary art at Stanford University before moving to Brooklyn in 2011. This year, Alex presented his academic work on the artist Glenn Ligon at the Queer Caucus for Art during the 2013 College Art Association conference. He also guest curated three film screenings in New York City for the experimental film platform Dirty Looks. Alex’s upcoming curatorial project, an exhibition of safer sex posters from the 1980s, will open in November 2013 at the Center for Sex & Culture in San Francisco.

Alex has written 5 article(s) for AFC.

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Alex Fialho

“The truth of the matter is that there is no one way to tackle queerness, and there is no one way to tackle queer art making,” Evan Garza, co-director of the Fire Island Artist Residency (FIAR), told me during my visit to the residency last week. Now in its third year, FIAR is the only artist residency in the country dedicated exclusively to queer, emerging artists. FIAR co-director Chris Bogia followed Garza’s sentiment, stating, “I always know that there is going to be some nugget of queerness in anything the residents do. The fun thing is seeing how it operates differently.”

It’s hard to ignore the glow from The Studio Museum in Harlem’s Artist-In-Residence alumni when visiting the museum. David Hammons, Kerry James Marshall and Julie Mehretu are just a few of the museum’s now famed past residents, so it’s easy to start thinking about who might be the next star. Of all three artists-in-residence—Njideka Akunliyi, Xaviera Simmons, and Meleko Mokgosi—Njideka Akunliyi gets my pick for who might eventually join the ranks of Hammons and Mehretu.

A lot of blood, sweat, and queers went into this year’s Fire Island Artist Residency (FIAR), the only residency in the country devoted exclusively to queer artists. While FIAR’s mission runs the risk of self-marginalization, it seems to have opened up an essential—not inherently essentializing—space for this year’s residents (Jade Yumang, Kris Grey, Nicolaus Chaffin, R.E.H. Gordon, and Brendan Fernandes). As Nicolaus Chaffin told AFC, “the importance of it all has been the ability to not use facets of our work to address and explain our positions, but rather just make the work, let the work exist.”

“It would be awesome if [prominent artist residency] Skowhegan was here, and just for homos!” Fire Island Artist Residency (FIAR) co-founder Chris Bogia told AFC recently, recalling his initial reaction to Fire Island. It was with this impetus that Bogia and co-founder Evan Garza founded FIAR, the only artist residency in the country devoted exclusively to queer artists. Bogia quickly added, “But I think that Fire Island Artist Residency is becoming something wholly unto itself, which is really exciting.”

July is shaping up to be an exciting month for queer art in the city, with a series of daily interventions titled “On Location” curated by Dirty Looks, the self-described “Monthly Roaming Platform for Queer Experimental Film and Video.” Dirty Looks has coordinated a screening or celebration in an art venue or a queer social site each and every day of the month, so if you have already missed out on the first few screenings (it is July 9th after all!), we are here to fill you in on some upcoming events that should not be overlooked.